However, indigo the colour does not occur in nature. The plants from which we derive indigo do not show any blue in their leaves, stems or flowers. Rather the colour indigo is achieved by fermenting the leaves of certain plant varieties to create indigo dye.
You can also check this video to see how one farm in India creates natural indigo dye in a traditional way. It involves very precise chemical processes to ferment the leaves of indigo plants to create the blue dye. Furthermore, unlike other textile dying processes, the fabric does not turn blue in the dye pot. Exposure to the air is required, so that a drying piece of dyed fabric will slowly turn from yellow to green, to a deep dark blue. But this process is also very fragile, and skilled artisan is needed to ensure success with indigo dying.
Too much fermentation, or not enough, or the wrong level of heat can destroy a whole batch of dye. For example, in parts of Indonesia, indigo dying is considered a sacred process that only women can take part in. Mothers traditionally teach the dying process to their daughters. Although interestingly, exceptions have been made for homosexual men.
Before the advent of chemical dyes, indigo dying was practiced throughout Europe, most of Africa, the middle East, most of Asia, and South and Central America. The European plant used to create indigo dye- Woad- created a far inferior colour to the plants that grew in the other indigo producing regions. For this reason, trade driven by European colonisation soon destroyed the local European dying industry.
At certain points in the 17th Century, indigo dye mainly from the plant Indigofera Tinctoria was the most valuable import into the Europe. Basically, wherever indigo was traditionally used, the colonising power would look to profit from the booming demand in indigo.
In West Africa, indigo textiles were considered so valuable that they were exchanged as currency. In fact, traditional Asian indigo textiles were shipped to West Africa by the European powers and used to exchange for slaves, who were then shipped on to work on indigo plantations. This plantation dye from the colonies would then be shipped to Europe. The global history of this dyed was thus tied up in the processes of slavery, exploitation, and colonisation.
What once was a revered material became a source of misery for countless plantation workers and slaves. One commentator in , E. Natural indigo dye only declined in prominence once a German chemist Adolf von Baeyer was able to synthesize the colour in Within a decade, it devastated the Indian indigo growing industry. Two thousand years ago, the Romans called this product indicum , and that name formed the root of the later English spellings, indico and indigo.
Early trade routes like the Silk Road brought indicum to Medieval Europe, but professional trade guilds actively resisted the introduction of Indian indigo into Europe for many generations. Since ancient times, Europeans had cultivated the woad plant Isatis tinctoria to produce a very similar blue dye for textiles, and woad farmers and dyers wanted to protect their traditional trade.
As indigo production shifted to the New World colonies in the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, however, Europeans eventually discovered that indigo was cheaper and more colorfast than woad, and that traditional market declined.
Indigo was grown in early South Carolina to produce blue dye that was exported to England for use in the British textile industry. Indigo formed a significant part of the South Carolina economy for approximately fifty years, from the late s to the late s. The cultivation and production of indigo also involved the labor of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of people in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
For this reason, the cultural memory of indigo is heightened among members of the African-American community along what is now called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Early South Carolina planters cultivated indigo to satisfy commercial demand for the dye product in the English later British textile industry.
This activity was one small part of a much larger mercantile economy. From a mercantile perspective, the entire purpose of the Carolina colony was to produce resources and wealth that would enhance the larger British economy and support the expansion of the British empire. The cultivation of indigo in colonial South Carolina was but a cog in that macroeconomic wheel of fortune that revolved around the hub of London.
As with tobacco in Virginia and sugar cane in the Caribbean, indigo was quite literally a foreign commodity to the early settlers of South Carolina. For South Carolinians, the foray into indigo production was a purely speculative venture. Indigo had no value to the early settlers of South Carolina except as a commodity for export.
The process of extracting the dyestuff from the plant was costly, time consuming, and labor intensive. The only motivation for investing time, money, and resources into such undertaking was the promise of profit at a market located more than three thousand miles away. Three distinct species of indigo were cultivated during the first century of the colony of South Carolina.
The first and most logical variety is, of course, the native species of wild indigo now classified as Indigofera caroliniana. This is a subtropical species that is found from southern Virginia to Louisiana along the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast of North America. Colonists did experiment with it here in the eighteenth century, but they deemed its dyestuff to be inferior—in both color and volume—to that of two imported species.
The ancient Indian species Indigofera tinctoria came to early South Carolina through contact with English, French, and Dutch merchants trading across the Atlantic and throughout the Caribbean. A species of indigo native to Guatemala Indigofera suffruticosa also came to early South Carolina through trans-Atlantic and Caribbean trade networks.
This Latin American species was cultivated for centuries by the indigenous Maya people of that region, and Spanish colonists began exporting indigo dye from Guatemala to Europe in the s.
Because of its hardy nature and beautiful dye, this Latin American species became the principal species of commercial indigo cultivation in South Carolina. Indigo seeds either I. In the early decades of this colony, European settlers planted a number of different crops as they tried to learn the qualities of the local soils and the seasonal ranges of the climate.
The same process of crop experimentation had led the early settlers of Virginia to focus on tobacco. The early English settlers of Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica had also experimented with indigo as well as tobacco, ginger, sugar cane, and cotton. Once those Caribbean planters perfected their techniques of harvesting sugar and rum from sugar cane in the s, however, they quickly abandoned their experiments and focused on that most profitable plant. Similarly, when South Carolina planters perfected the cultivation of rice in the late s, they temporarily set aside other crops like indigo and focused on the most profitable commodity.
The French Protestant or Huguenot immigrants who came to early South Carolina probably arrived with a greater familiarity with indigo than their English neighbors.
White Europeans were not the only people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, of course, so the story of indigo in this colony involves many other people. To my knowledge, there is no surviving evidence that the indigenous Native Americans of early South Carolina cultivated indigo, so the local Indians could not have introduced it to the early settlers, as they did with maize and tobacco elsewhere.
It is possible, however, that African captives transported to early South Carolina might have had some experience with indigo cultivation in their native land, or had learned about it in the Caribbean before coming here. Enslaved people were certainly deeply involved in the production of indigo in early South Carolina, but it seems unlikely that they would have had the freedom to cultivate the crop and manufacture the blue dye for their own use. An early South Carolina planter named Robert Stevens died , for example, described the process of extracting the blue dye from the plant in the autumn of The large-scale, commercial exportation of indigo dyestuff from South Carolina to England commenced in , following a revival of interest in the crop.
Because much of this warfare unfolded on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the complex web of colonial trade networks suffered greatly. South Carolina planters who had focused almost solely on rice, for example, saw their profits fall while insurance rates skyrocketed.
At the same time, Britain experienced great difficulty in obtaining exotic goods like indigo, olive oil, silk, and wine through their traditional suppliers, France and Spain. In light of these conditions, the governments of both Britain and her American colonies encouraged immediate diversification. During the late s and early s, hundreds of South Carolina planters experimented with a variety of plants in the hopes of finding new commodities that were both well-adapted to the local soil and climate and valuable to the British economy.
To encourage planters to experiment with the production of wine, olive or sesamum oil see Episode No. The bounty enacted in was to be in effect for a period of five years, but the fast pace of agricultural experimentation led to an important revision in less than two.
Benne seed oil and indigo were the front runners in this competition, but indigo was clearly in the lead.
In mid-April , the South Carolina legislature cancelled the bounty on indigo only, stating that so much of the blue dye had been produced recently that the continuation of the bounty was impractical. The economic drive to produce indigo was further enhanced in the spring of when the British Parliament enacted their own stimulus package. Much of the need for indigo is being met with other types of blue dyes and today most of the indigo used by the world is made out-side the United States.
Researchers are concentrating on new methods of indigo manufacture that are more environmentally friendly. One promising future method involves using biocatalysts in the dye reaction process. Indigo dye may be one of the first high-volume chemicals made through a biological route. Genencor International, of Rochester New York, is evaluating a process to produce indigo using biotechnology. According to Charles T. However, at this time the technology is expensive and production costs could be prohibitive.
Genencor is seeking a major market partner to work with them in the development of this new technology. Manufacturers who use indigo in dying operations are also seeking to improve their use of the dye. Compared to traditional methods of stonewashing fabric dyed with indigo, their new process uses few, if any, pumice stones which help give the fabric its faded look.
Therefore, pumice stone handling and storage costs are reduced, along with time required to separate pumice from garments after stonewashing. It also uses much less bleach. Therefore, this new process not only reduces garment damage, but also reduces waste produced by the stones and bleach. Kirk, R. Othmer ed. Wiley-Interscience, John Wiley and Sons, Guilbaut, G. McCurry, John. Rotman, David, and Emma Chynoweth.
Toggle navigation. Made How Volume 6 Indigo Indigo. Periodicals Guilbaut, G. Other articles you might like:. Also read article about Indigo from Wikipedia. User Contributions: 1. Anshuman Singh. I think regarding Indigo history part, it needs to be corrected as Indigo has been known to be used in Indus valley civilization at around BC, predating it's use in any other civilization.
From where it found it's way to Africa, Europe and Americas via trade route. Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: Name:.
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